Mickey Spillane Biography

Born Frank Morrison Spillane, March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, NY; died of
pancreatic cancer, July 17, 2006, in Murrells Inlet, SC. Author. Mickey
Spillane created the most hard-bitten of all the hard-boiled detectives in
American crime fiction, Mike Hammer. The 13 novels in the series that
Spillane produced between 1947 and 1996 rarely won over critics, but sold
millions of copies, were adapted for film and television, and gave him a
devoted readership. According to his
Times
of London obituary, a writer for
Life
magazine once remarked that Spillane wrote books that "no one
likes except the public."

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Frank Morrison Spillane was born in 1918
to a Presbyterian mother and Irish Catholic father who supported the
family with a job as a bartender. Called Mickey from his childhood, he
graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1935 and held down
a variety of jobs as a young man, including lifeguard and circus
trampoline performer. He enrolled at a Kansas college at one point with a
plan to study law, but dropped out and went on to serve as a fighter pilot
instructor with the U.S. Air Force during World War II. When he returned
to civilian life and the New York City area, he found steady work as a
comicbook writer.

Spillane's first Mike Hammer story,
I, the Jury
, took him just two weeks to write and was published in 1947. Critics were
merciless in their reviews of the violence-laden tale of a war veteran who
learns that his old combat buddy has been slain and sets out to avenge the
death. It was published in hardcover and sold a respectable number of
copies, but the 25-cent Signet paperback went on to sell five million
copies in five years.

Spillane went on to produce several more titles in the series, and at one
point was the best-selling fiction writer in the United States. In 1952,
however, he converted to the Jehovah's Witness faith, and did not
write any more Hammer novels for the next nine years. He even spent his
days proselytizing door to door, a common outreach tenet of the faith. In
1961, he began writing again with
The Girl Hunters
, and found that his anti-hero's popularity had not abated with
readers. He even appeared in the 1963 film version of
The Girl Hunters
, making him the one of the rare authors ever to portray his own fictional
detective in a film adaptation.

Three more Mike Hammer tales appeared that decade, but critics continued
to savage Spillane's writing, faulting it for excessive violence,
misogyny, and fairly obvious plot resolutions. His approach to his craft
was a pragmatic one, however. "I don't give a hoot about
reading reviews," he once said, according to
Los Angeles Times
journalist Dennis McLellan. "What I want to read is the royalty
checks." Despite the bad reviews, Spillane's protagonist and
his actions seemed to resonate with readers, and "the vengeance or
vigilante theme running through many of the stories foreshadowed the kind
of thrillers in which Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were to star a
generation later," noted the
Times
of London.

Spillane's personal life was almost as colorful as anything he
might have written: In marked contrast to the gore and sex in his
detective stories, he also produced children's books, such as
The Day the Sea Rolled Back
. He had four children with his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce, whom he
married in 1945. After their divorce, he wed a singer and actress, Sherri
Malinou, who was more than two decades his junior and rather infamously
posed nude for the cover of his 1972 novel
The Erection Set
. They lived apart for most of their marriage, however, and were divorced
in the 1980s in a well-publicized court battle over assets related to the
second of the television adaptations of the Hammer stories. Spillane also
appeared in more than 100 television ads for Miller Lite beer, costumed in
a trench coat and fedora in a spoof of his character, which ran from 1973
to 1988.

With fans still clamoring for another Hammer story, Spillane wrote
The Killing Man
in 1989, the same year his South Carolina beach home was devastated by a
hurricane. He rebuilt it himself, and continued to write, producing his
last Hammer title,
Black Alley
, in 1996. He died at the home in Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina,
on July 17, 2006, at the age of 88 from pancreatic cancer. Survivors
include his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, and his four children from
the marriage to Pierce—sons Ward and Mike, and daughters Kathy and
Caroline—as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
"I have no fans," he once asserted in an interview,
according to Richard Severo of the
New York Times
. "You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your
friends."